Client devices used in today's society include mobile phones, personal digital assistants, smartphones, set-top boxes, multimedia playback devices, desktop computers, tablets, portable computers, gaming devices, and various other electronic communication devices. Many of these client devices play live and stored multimedia assets, such as television shows, movies, music, sporting events, and other live and stored multimedia assets. A media delivery system can stream the live and stored multimedia assets to client devices, where the media delivery system may support a plurality of multimedia representations for each asset. A multimedia representation is an instance of a multimedia asset based on the video encoding, the audio encoding, or the delivery protocol used to deliver the multimedia asset. For example, while a multimedia asset consists of a single piece of content, each multimedia asset may have several multimedia representations. Each multimedia asset may have several multimedia representations because different multimedia representations permit the multimedia asset to be consumed on a variety of client devices. This is because different client devices have different capabilities. For example, desktop computer monitors typically have higher resolutions than smartphones, and wired set-top box connections stream data faster than wireless laptop connections.
Unfortunately, a problem exists in determining which media representation is appropriate when delivering a multimedia asset to a specific client device. For example, a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) adaptive streaming media server may have the capability to serve a wide range of multimedia representation variants for each multimedia asset to accommodate different types of client devices and network connections. However, not all of the multimedia representation variants are appropriate for every client device. For example, the resolution of one variant may not be optimal for a given client device, the bitrate requirement of another variant may be too high for a given client device connection, or other variants may not be suitable for certain client devices.